Trading Scars
by trueunbeliever
Summary: Sam and Jess aren't without their scars. Sharing them, on the other hand, is something they never thought they'd do. But this is what they are for each other, and this is what they need. It's nice, sometimes, to have someone who understands. (One Shot. Please review :) All comments are welcome)


**_A/N: Sooo, Fearless Readers, it looks like I'm back with another fic that isn't one of the sequels I promised. At any rate, here's my new one shot, featuring Sam and Jess. Hope you like :) _**

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The first night was the worst, not because of the intensity of the nightmare, but because it was so unexpected that Jessica didn't know what to do. She thought it was a part of her own dream at first, the low moans coming from beside her, until they grew too loud for her to sleep through and she woke with a start. She watched as Sam cringed in his sleep, but he didn't move much besides. She knew it was a nightmare, but without the thrashing that she'd come to expect from her own, she didn't know whether it was bad enough to wake him up.

"No," he mumbled. "Hurts."

She had her answer then.

"Sam," she whispered. "Wake up." She shook his shoulder, but he didn't budge, just continued mumbling in his sleep.

"Dean, stop. Please. No more."

"Sam, c'mon. Wake up. You're having a nightmare. It's not real." She shook him again.

Sam gasped and sat straight up in bed, hand immediately flying under his pillow, looking for something. Jessica didn't know what, but the slightly panicked expression on his face when he came up empty was heartbreaking. He shook with the remnants of his nightmare, sweat dripping down his face, though the air was relatively cool in their Palo Alto apartment.

Jessica rubbed circles in his back, wanting to keep contact to ground him in reality. Even after he focused on her face, soothing nothings whispered in his ear, the muscles in his back were tense under her fingers. But she watched him come back to himself, calming visibly right in front of her, breath evening out, heart rate steadying, until there was no remnant of whatever had taken hold of him in the night.

"You okay?" she asked.

He smiled at her. "Yeah," he said. "Just a dream."

And other than the tensed back muscles—which could have just been hard muscle to begin with—he didn't look at all put out by his dream. The smile in place was amused at her worry, nothing like the mask she expected it to be. Still, she wasn't convinced that it was 'just a dream.' Whoever this Dean person was, he'd obviously hurt Sam at some point, and it had made a lasting impression.

"You wanna talk about it?"

"I said I'm fine, Jess. Let's just lay down and go back to sleep."

She did as he asked and laid down, but sleep didn't come for either of them easily. Jessica fit herself over him, her hand resting on his heart as she nestled into the arm that curled protectively around her.

Nearly an hour passed before she spoke, the words tumbling from her mouth more out of a need to fill the silence than anything else. "Remember when I mentioned that I broke my arm once?" she asked him quietly. He shifted under her, and she could feel his gaze on her face though she stared resolutely at his torso.

"Yeah," he said, obviously curious as to where she was going with it.

"I lied. I didn't fall off my bike. My father broke it."

There was a sharp intake of breath from beneath her cheek, but Sam didn't say anything.

"He was drunk and I knew I was going to get in trouble for staying out so late, but I didn't want to go home. He was beyond pissed off. I mean, he didn't mean to break anything, just pulled too hard and snap, but I kept thinking it was my fault, you know?" Despite the fact that her voice was a careful monotone, a couple of tears escaped at the memory, residual from a time when she would cry herself to sleep every night. "It isn't the worst thing, but it made an impression. It's what happens every time I have a nightmare," she confessed, though she didn't tell him everything. Sometimes she broke her arm, sometimes her leg, sometimes her neck while she hung limp in her father's hands.

She heard the hitch in Sam's breath as his arms tightened around her. It was nice, comforting in a way she couldn't explain.

"Hunting trip," he said after a while. Jessica looked up at him, but his face was the well-concealed mask she'd expected earlier, one she didn't even have a hope of breaking through. He smiled at her, warm and guarded, and she nearly cried at that look because it was so well placed that he had to have practiced it to the point of perfection. She didn't want to know how often he'd had to smile through the pain.

"My brother and I went out hunting, used to go hunting all the time before I came out here."

Jessica grimaced at the thought of anyone, especially Sam, hunting Bambi. He was huge, but he was nothing more than a big teddy bear. Violence definitely didn't become him.

"I hated it so much," he told her. "But it was just something the Winchesters did, so I did it too. Dean and I were after a bear." He twitched, ever so subtle. "It had been bothering the locals so we grabbed a couple of guns and went out. Should have been nothing, but I got grazed. My first hunt and I was terrified, didn't react fast enough when the claws came out."

Sam absentmindedly brushed his fingers across his abdomen where a few light scars laid in parallel lines down his side. If she hadn't heard the story, she never even would have seen them, they were so faded.

"Dad was gone, who knows where. Nineteen years old and Dean practically had to drag me through the woods and haul my ass to the car on his own."

Jess nodded in understanding. From the few times he'd ever talked about his father, there wasn't much good he had to say about the man. She suspected that he wasn't around much, not that that was a bad thing. She had a feeling that if his father had been closer to the boys, it wouldn't have been all smiles and good times like Sam seemed to have thought.

"He took you to the hospital," Jess continued when he stopped, not content to leave the story there. She was surprised to hear him scoff.

"God, no. No insurance. He took me back to whatever hotel we were staying at and got the suture kit. He stitched me up right then and there with a couple of ibuprofen and a forth of whiskey to dull the pain."

"Didn't it hurt?" she asked.

Sam nodded. "Begged Dean to stop as soon as the needle pierced skin, but I already knew he couldn't. He was fast though and it was just a low throb by the time he was halfway so it wasn't too bad. I don't know why it keeps bothering me. It isn't the worst thing that's ever happened."

Sam half-shrugged and Jessica knew that he hoped she would leave it alone. It wasn't like her, though, to leave things unfinished, especially when it was something like this. She looked back down, wanting to hear more, but not knowing what to say. She didn't want to push him, but he seemed lighter somehow after talking about it. Maybe…

"Fourth birthday," she said, holding her wrist up and showing the dime-shaped scar there. "Cigar."

Sam's fingers curled around her wrist, careful of the mark, and brought it to his lips. He kissed it gently. "I'm sorry," he whispered.

"He always threatened to, but I never thought he'd actually do it. It's funny. All I could think of when it touched my skin was that it should hurt more, and then it burned so bad that I screamed and he just kept holding it down. Three times… the bastard just kept relighting it."

The last was said in a whisper. She let out a small shiver at the memory. She'd never told anyone about her scars before. It was something she never thought she'd do. But Sam was different from anyone she'd dated. He understood, which was more than she ever believed anyone capable.

He kissed it again and released her wrist over his chest. She trailed her hand down to softly finger another scar just over his belly button. It was short, but thick, and jagged in a way that screamed painful.

"Twelve," he said, answering her unspoken question. "Knife. Dad was gone, some other state on business, and he left us with a _friend_." He twisted the word in a way that had Jessica believing the man was anything but. "He decided that me and my brother needed a bit of self-defense training, but it was just an excuse to knock us around some. He started beating on Dean, gave him a concussion, so I pulled a knife..." he trailed off as if to say, _and that was that_.

"Dean stitched you up?" she asked, unsure of whether Sam wanted to talk about the particulars of that experience. From the way he was slightly trembling, she assumed not.

"Not that time," he said, his voice slightly hoarse.

She took another look at the scar. It was swollen and angry, not smooth and nearly nonexistent like the rake of claws on his side. It wasn't something that had been stitched at all, she was sure. They'd left it like that? she wondered. If Dean didn't fix it, it had to have been because of the concussion, but his father? The friend? But she understood more than he probably thought.

"I have one like that," she whispered.

She looked up into hazel eyes, seeking comfort. His brow was furrowed in confusion, but the concern in his gaze was palpable.

With the hand that rested over his torso, she guided him to the three inch gash of a scar on her back. He'd noticed the other scars, she knew, had shown concern over them, but this was one he'd missed, one she hated to show.

"Sixteen," she told him, her voice small. Why had she decided she needed to push this? She was terrified now. "Knife. It was after the divorce," she said, her voice growing stronger as she spoke. "Dad decided that I was his and wanted to take me back. I refused, didn't wanna be anywhere near him. He held a knife to my back and dragged me out the back door. Tripped. Fell..." She took a page from Sam's book and shrugged, letting his imagination tell the rest.

"They didn't stitch you up?"

She shook her head. "He had me for two weeks before the cops caught up to him. By that time, it was too late to stitch, and an infection already set in. Spent three days in the hospital."

They were both silent for a while after that, both lost in their memories. Jessica recounted the dozens of other scars she had. Some were nearly invisible now, like the shallow cut of glass on her hip, but most were still around in places only she knew about. There were the burn scars on the soft flesh of her arm, the thin slashes on the arch of her foot, the switch marks on her rear. They were subtle, sure, but they were there, and Jessica had lived every single one of them.

"Eight," Sam said, pulling her from the past with the gentle timbre of his voice. "My brother borrowed this kid's bike and brought it back to the hotel. No helmet, no pads, _way_ too big, but I didn't care. I mean, I was eight. Anyway, Dean grabbed hold of the seat and just pushed me around the parking lot. Then the bastard let go of the seat before I was ready and I did an immediate nose dive into one of the neighbor's fenders."

She looked closer at his face where, just below his shaggy bangs, was a light scar that would disappear if he blushed. She smiled at him, loving how his face lit up at the memory, a small turn of the lips. She didn't have many of those, but there were a few that had left their mark on her body as well.

"Thirteen," she said, smiling at the memory. "My mom is, like, the best cook in the universe."

"Something that skips a generation, I presume?" Sam asked, teasing.

"Shut up," she said with mock anger, slapping him playfully in retaliation. "Or I'm cooking every night for the next month."

"Sorry," he said. "Continue."

"Yeah, well, as you already know, it's something that _skips a generation_, not that that stopped her from trying to teach me." She flipped over the wrist that had the cigar burn to reveal a small, nearly invisible, scar on the back of her hand. "First day of Mom's Culinary School and I spilled boiling water all over the floor, destroyed an entire chuck roast, and gave myself this beauty trying to cut the potatoes."

Like he did with the burn scar, Sam brought the hand to his lips and kissed it. "Well," he said, laying both of their intertwined hands on his chest. "We definitely can't have any of that in this place. I'm officially banning you from the kitchen."

Jessica laughed into his side, his deep chuckles reverberating through her as she did so.

When they both calmed down, he kissed the top of her head. She felt drained, all of a sudden, and just wanted to sleep for the next week or two. She closed her eyes and was nearly nestled in the Land of Nod when she heard Sam speak, unsure whether she was meant to hear it or not.

"It's good to have someone who understands," he said, kissing her forehead again before closing his own eyes in sleep.

Jessica couldn't agree more.

End.

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_**A/N: A bit angsty for my taste, but I couldn't really help it :) Let me know what you think, Readers. And there will be more fics on my profile in two weeks. Read on!**_


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